Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In Extraenvironmentalist #59 we speak with critical theorist Max Haiven about the financialization of higher education and how it has limited our imagination…Then, we talk to Kio Stark about her recent book Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything
We are living through an unprecedented period of human history. Our population has exploded. We are now nearing or surpassing planetary limits that call into question the future of the global economy. And one problematic idea sits in the middle of it all. That idea is that MONEY = DEBT and its close relative of CUMULATIVE INTEREST. In order to break the 10,000 year cycle of empire and perpetual growth, we have to employ a different model for economic activity. Luckily, we have one — the ecosystem.
Shakespeare’s Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Many of our nation’s Founding Fathers emphatically saw it otherwise. They often lived by the maxim: always a borrower, never a lender be. As tobacco and rice planters, slave traders, and merchants, as well as land and currency speculators, they depended upon long lines of credit to finance their livelihoods and splendid ways of life. So, too, in those days, did shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, and farmers, as well as casual laborers and sailors. Without debt, the seedlings of a commercial economy could never have grown to maturity.
The only U.S. state to own its own depository bank today is North Dakota. North Dakota is also the only state to have escaped the 2008 banking crisis, sporting a sizable budget surplus every year since then.
